Bressay Stone Shetland And Beyond

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In 1855 the Irish archaeologist James Graves examined the ogham inscription on its edge, and proposed that the stone was a joint memorial to the daughter of someone called Naddodd, and to the son of a Druid called Benres. Graves thought that Naddodd was probably the Viking of that name who discovered Iceland in the ninth century, and he concluded that the inscription must be a mixture of Irish and Icelandic . His view that the Bressay stone is late, and that its inscription contains words from two or even three languages, was influential .

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Why did the Pictish language of Shetland and Orkney disappear? Gillian Fellows-Jensen suggests that it was because there was 'no communication' between Vikings and natives in the islands . Barnes disagrees. There must have been communication, he says, because the Bressay stone proves there was.

He reckoned that it was a poor copy of a much more impressive sculpture from Papil, in the isle of Burra, to which he now assigned 'a date only just, if at all, prior to the Norse occupation of Shetland .' The Bressay stone was, he concluded, part of the 'dregs of Pictish tradition' .

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Jackson's remarks about the Bressay stone, like Stevenson's, were brief, but they have had an inordinate effect on the War and Peace debate. So has his view that the Picts spoke an ancient and unfathomable language.

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During his discussion he too considered the Bressay stone. He spotted the word 'meqq', meaning , on it, and assumed it was a primitive Gaelic word. He argued, following Stevenson's dating of the stone, that the oghamist had used a Gaelic rather than a Pictish word because the stone was very late. On the other hand he regarded the word 'dattrr' on the stone as the Norse word for 'daughter'. '[T]he whole thing', he concluded, much as Graves had said in 1855, 'seems to point to a very mixed language in Shetland in the late ninth or early tenth century, after the Norse settlements there' .

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And what of the Bressay stone? Is it as young as Stevenson imagined? Is its language as 'mixed' as Jackson proposed? Stevenson reopened the question in 1981. In the meantime Charles Thomas had written an important article about Shetland's sculptured stones. Thomas didn't mention Bressay, but he concluded that the Papil stone was sculptured sometime after AD 750: that is, before Scandinavians arrived in the Northern Isles . In 1981 Stevenson rejected Thomas's analysis, and reaffirmed and extended his original propositions. He still dated the Papil stone to the very end of the eighth century, and he now said that the Bressay stone 'seems to be a considerably later copy'. He claimed that the Bressay stone was a grave-marker for what he called a 'half-Pict', and concluded that 'there were in Shetland active Christians erecting sculptured monuments in the tenth century' .

These propositions are incompatible. They depend on one artefact-the problematical Bressay stone-and on the re-use of Pictish Christian sites in the islands by Norse settlers. There are indeed Pictish sites in the islands which later became Norse Christian sites; but centuries separate the two events. St Ninians Isle in Shetland is a good example. As Charles Thomas points out :

Without Norse words Stevenson's date based on the sculpture begins to look suspect. Remember that Stevenson's chronology assumed a very late date for the Papil stone; and if we consider Thomas's arguments we have to acknowledge that there is at least doubt about that. It will be a long time before the problems of the Bressay stone are solved. But as things stand we certainly can't use it as linguistic or artistic evidence for cultural contact between Picts and Vikings .

Barnes says that '[t]here is really nothing in the linguistic evidence to conflict with the view that the incoming Scandinavians reached some kind of accommodation with the native population'. But our sole linguistic evidence is the Bressay stone! In fact, the evidence that there is Norse influence in that artefact is very meagre indeed. Katherine Forsyth has suggested that the name that looks like Naddodd on the stone may be Pictish ; and Barnes himself has speculated that the word 'dattr' on it may be Pictish as well . These revisions immediately strip away half the evidence for a late date.

The Bressay Stone was found accidentally by a labourer in approx 1851

A particularly fine 9th-century Pictish cross-slab, the Bressay Stone lies in the graveyard of the abandoned 12th century St. Mary's Church at on the northeast coast of the island of in . The stone was found here by a workman in 1852 and is decorated with an ornate cross-head, a horseman between two monks, various beasts (including a boar) and several symbols. Importantly, it also features an Ogham inscription which combines Norse names and words with Gaelic, leading some to suggest that Norse settlement of Scotland was not as violent as has been assumed. In 1864 the stone was removed to the National Museum of Antiquities in Edinburgh (now the Museum of Scotland). However, a replica was erected within the churchyard by the Shetland Council of Churches in 2000 to celebrate the Millennium.

It is presumed to be like the Bressay Stone

Like everyone else who deals with the arrival of Norse settlers in the Northern Isles, Wainwright had to face the fact that there are apparently few or no pre-Norse place-names there. This is a very curious situation, and requires an explanation. Wainwright now argued that the Picts in the islands spoke Jackson's mysterious non-Indo-European language. As a result, he hinted, we can't recognise their place-names, because we don't know what to look for. He implied that there are such names in Shetland and Orkney, but that we can't see them. He went on to accept Stevenson's dating for and argument about the Bressay stone .